The open-source Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client will be updated for the second time in a week because of code changes that have stopped some third-party extensions from functioning correctly.

Nope, XP, Yellowtab Zeta RC3 and Ubuntu Warty right now... Although I spend 99% of my time in XP, I run the others under M$ VPC since Zeta and Ubuntu seem to work like $#!T native on this box... My bad, Radeon 9800, what did I expect... ATI and linux to actually WORK together?

>>I browse like mad, but I never have this problem on either XP or KDE. I admit it doesn't have a small footprint..but it doesn't do gobbling either.

Do you close out ALL your windows on a regular basis? I've noticed saving images really seems to excasterbate the problem...

Go to... a gallery website... let's say http://zip.4channel.org/k/imgboard.html ... Now open up all the images in that first page of /k in their own tab while watching your memory use... Now close all the images, but not the original page you opened them from... and go to the next page and repeat. You'll notice that when you close the tabs not all the memory is released. Do that enough times, and by my own experiments you'll hit about 240 megs of footprint and it all goes to hell, forcing you to kill it's process... even when it hits the 160 meg mark (and I've seen this on machines with 2 gigs of ram) the system will start to slow to a crawl... Again, if you actually start saving images or worse video it goes to hell a LOT faster. It's really easy to recreate.

Only 'workaround' is to do a 100% exit out of firefox before you reach that point.

... and yes, I realize posting a link to 4chan costs me some credibility, but it is a good example of a site to break Firefox with. Go ahead, call me a /b-tard.